Among the flurry of support that the latest Muslim provocateur — 14-year-old faux-clock-bomb maker Ahmed Mohamed — received earlier this month was a posting by facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, reading, “Having the skill and ambition to build something cool should lead to applause, not arrest. The future belongs to people like Ahmed.”

In a recent article in The New Yorker entitled “All Scientists Should be Militant Atheists”, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss penned a scathing essay disavowing any relationship between science and religion.

How many times has it been said or written sarcastically of us Balkans heretics that “The place she wants you to worry about for terrorism is not in the Middle East or Pakistan, but in the Balkans. She wants you to think that Bosnia/Kosovo is the next Afghanistan.”

When a woman accepts a job working for an orthodox Jewish congregation, she knows what values that synagogue espouses and stands for. Alana Schultz worked at Congregation Shearith Israel for 11 years - more than enough time to know full well that Orthodox Judaism frowns upon pregnancy before marriage. Nevertheless, she waited until she was 5 months pregnant and unwed before revealing her condition to her supervisor and several weeks later was fired despite having married in the interim. Typical of today’s default conception of women as victims, this woman has sued the congregation for discrimination, raising some interesting questions.

In the spring of 2011, I heard about a dazzling young conservative, the former solicitor general of Texas, who was running for a soon-to-be-open U.S. Senate seat. Brilliant and charismatic, he was a Princeton and Harvard Law graduate who seemed to relish rubbing that pedigree in the faces of Ivy League liberals who couldn’t fathom why he wasn’t “one of them.” But Ted Cruz would never be “one of them,” and that gave him the makings of a conservative superstar.

When it comes to villains in works of fiction, nothing beats the Mob - dapper, well-coiffed men, with colorful nicknames and powerful underworld connections, who exude a dark romanticism in movies like The Godfather, Casino, and Goodfellas.

A teenage boy brings a ticking mechanical object with wires, screws and electrical components hanging from it to his high school. He shows it to his engineering teacher and explains that it’s a homemade alarm clock; that teacher calls it “nice” but advises the boy not to show it to other teachers. Ignoring this advice, the boy brings his invention to his English class where it beeps, is revealed to the English teacher who wisely notifies school authorities who immediately call police. So far, this sounds like exactly the type of reaction you would want from any school or public facility in a country that has already lost too many people to the unsuspected acts of terrorists, malicious students and mentally ill individuals. The clock is confiscated and the boy is suspended from school for 3 days.

A series of press releases is now hitting the newswires worldwide, bringing major hope to the refugees hurdling via the Aegean from Turkey to Greece, via Serbia to Austria, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and all the way to Sweden, France and the United Kingdom. The Islamic Republic of Iran, whose Government is proud to represent the entire Islamic Umma, and who has just received 150 billion dollars via the Iran deal, has magnanimously offered to absorb all the three million refugees now frustrated at the borders of several European countries. The Supreme Guide ordered the earmarking of 15 of the 150 billion dollars, a mere 10%, to be granted for the resettlement of the refugees, not just from Syria but also from any parts of the Middle East and North Africa, in multiple regions inside Iran, including on the beautiful less inhabited coasts of the Caspian sea and the southern coasts on the Indian Ocean. The Islamic Republic gesture would in one shot solve the entire crisis of the refugees by absorbing them as migrants among their brothers and sisters in Iran.

Of the myriad of mind-blowing flaws contained in the Iran nuclear deal — a subject that has dominated the foreign policy debate across the country this summer — there’s one angle that hasn’t gotten enough attention.

A weekly column in the Sunday Times Magazine concerns questions of ethics which are addressed by three experts at least partially selected for the diversity they’re meant to represent. With first names like Kwame, Kenji and Amy, we can see immediately that this troika come from different races and ethnicities. In a rare example of e pluribus unum, all three moral mavens responded in unanimity to this week’s question which concerned the following dilemma.